Rev. Nancy D. Dean

May 7, 2006

The Flowering of Principle

I recently came across a story as I was looking for material for quite another sermon, but it does deal, albeit rather second-hand, with flowers. The story is about President Harry S. Truman, that Missouri born and bred president of the post World War II years, well-known for his straightforward, plain manner of speaking. He made a speech at the Washington Garden Club, during which he kept referring to the "good manure" that needed to be used on the flowers. Later, some of the women members complained to his wife, Bess. "Couldn't you get the president to say 'fertilizer'?" they asked.

Mrs. Truman's reply: "Heavens no. It took me twenty-five years to get him to say 'manure.'"

Perhaps the reason it fits my topic today is less about flowers and more about manure.

Flowers are beautiful, at least most of them, and humans seem to innately respond to this beauty. But the beauty in the blossom is really the end of the story, at least in some ways, for we know that there must be so much that comes before: the soil, the seed, the water, the sun--all those things that are crucial to the eventual blossoming of a plant, shrub, or tree. Of course, even though the blossom is short-lived, its role is crucial, for without its fragrance and color, the species would not be propagated.

But back to the manure. As human beings began to appreciate the beauty of flowers, perhaps also to appreciate their role in the interdependent web, someone discovered that if you add more fertilizer you get bigger more beautiful blossoms. (That seems to be something else that is native to our being, the desire to make what exists bigger and better--and if not better, more powerful in some way.)

But back to the manure. The organic matter is usually unpleasant, often very unpleasant. Those of us who live in this Hockessin/Kennett Square vicinity are well acquainted with the unpleasant smell of manure. I still chuckle when I recall that during the week I was here as the candidate for this pulpit back in April 1995, I was being driven around the area, and I recall well that we were driving through Hockessin, down Valley Road, on my second or third day, when my suddenly a smell assaulted my olfactory senses. I said nothing. No one else said anything, at least not about this quite obvious unpleasant smell. At some level I think I quickly realized that this could not possibly have originated from within the car, but there was that brief moment. . . . It wasn’t until some months later that I learned about the mushroom industry, and what is locally termed “Hok-essence.” I think no one wanted to discourage me that I might have to live with the frequent smell of mushroom fertilizer if I moved to this area. Or perhaps it just goes to show that many people are uncomfortable talking about manure.

Norbert Capek, the Czech Unitarian minister, who had lived with the worst kind of human behavior, the disgusting nature of ego so blind in the desire for power that the very soul corrupts. This is where all human evil originates, in this corruption that begins in the human mind/heart/soul. The manure, again. Manure, the fertilizer of evil is created in the kind of thinking that drove Hitler and the Nazi party to believe they could decide who would rule all others, who should have all the wealth, and even to who had the right to live or die. Principles had little to do with the world of the Nazis. Capek, and all those people who lived and died under that evil empire, felt this first hand.

But principles, particularly our Seven UU Principles, and the sources from which they derive, are also fertilizer. Fertilizer is generally considered good, at least when used correctly. It simply is a growth enhancer, but over used, it poisons the soil, and will kill the plants. In fact, or so I have been told, weed killer is really just fertilizer, but in such excess that it causes the plant to die. (No doubt the new varieties are more specialized, but that that was how the first kinds worked.) So, too, in human affairs; too much determination to toward control and power is destructive.

Capek was the leader of a large Unitarian community in transition. The old Christian Unitarian forms of worship were not speaking to his 3200 member congregation, especially not amidst this time of such corruption. Capek understood that his congregation needed to move away from the ugliness of the Nazis who would eventually see him as subversive so that he was eventually arrested and died in a concentration camp.

Capek wanted for the people to do something they had not been able to do for too long, which was focus on beauty. Not on death and dying which the old, traditional communion did. Further, theologically Unitarians were at this time moving away from the Christian roots to a greater, more inclusive understanding of religion. Capek instinctively understood that this was a time to think about the blossom, about the beauty that can arise out of the darkness, out of the filth, a blossom from which to seed a new plant.

Here we are today, sixty-six years after the end of World War II, even more years after the death of Norbert Capek, and his dream still lives in this flower communion now celebrated around the world in our Unitarian and UU congregations.

But back to the manure. A colleague wrote of the Flower Communion:

This Unitarian Universalist Communion. …a giving and receiving of  flowers, the symbols of life's rebirth and renewal…of life’s longing for itself … is human… is sacred.

[and]
The locus of the holy is in the community. It is through our intent that we collectively manifest the grace and authority by which the symbols of this communion are consecrated.

Living a life based on principle is our goal as a community of faith. That is never an easy goal, and even more important because we have to work constantly to achieve it. The flowering of principle comes not from ease, the superficial, the surface, but it arises out the pain and suffering of all people, in all times, from the darkness, the dirt, and the manure of life. That is what Norbert Capek hoped and prayer for, and what he also died for.

Let us celebrate the fact that each of us, beloved friends, have all this potential within our minds and spirits, too, and that we can feed the flowering of our souls to do good and to be beautiful and to contribute to the next generation in the great circle of life.

So be it. Amen. Blessed be.

May 14, 2006 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

May 14, 2006

There’s a Reason for Everything that Happens for a Reason

First, Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers present this morning. There is no more important work than the thoughtful care of the young. Julia Ward Howe who created the first attempt at Mother’s Day, best know for writing the Battle Hymn of Republic, was a Unitarian, her family belonged to James Freeman Clark’s Church of the Disciples, she also worked with Universalist women on the cause dearest to her heart which was abolition, and it was out of that work that she initiated the Mothers' Peace Day 1872. It didn’t take hold as a national holiday. Still, it was clear to Howe that peace was something best promoted by the greatest of peacemakers (at least in her day), mothers. No doubt Julia Ward Howe would have said that indeed there is a reason for everything that happens, and we each need to take responsibility for our role in the world in making things happen or changing what has been happening.

My husband is one of the Lost people. I imagine there are several Lost people in this room right now. Lost, as in the television series Lost, which is the saga of a group of people whose plane crashed on a remote Pacific island, and who must survive in the shadow of a mysterious group of islanders, etc. I watched a couple episodes with my beloved, thanks to the miracle of DVR, and one thing that struck me was that one of the main characters keeps saying that everything happens for a reason. This character, whose name is amusingly John Locke (also the name of a famous rationalist philosopher) experienced a healing of his paralysis as a result of the plane crash, which he now believes was a miraculous event that has happened for a reason beyond the mere fact of the plane crashing. This has given him tremendous peace, and confidence, so that he is in many ways become the spiritual center of this motley crew of passengers. I was informed this morning that now another character on the show is building a church, so I predict that religious strife is on the way. When it comes to screenwriting, there is definitely a reason for everything that gets written into the plot.

This idea or belief that everything happens for a reason is a construct that can be understood in two diametrically opposed ways. I first heard the astronomer Carl Sagan restate this when talking about astrology, the belief that the movement of the planets and stars governs our lives—no doubt Sagan was showing a sensitivity of the scientific astronomers at too often being confused in the minds of ordinary folk with astrology which astronomers say is pure superstition. Sagan famously said of the notion that planets and stars have anything to do with our lives, much less the notion that every baby born in this moment has the same profile, that the gravity produced by the obstetrician in the room at the time of delivery has more influence on the baby than the planets and stars.

Sagan said further, in the mode of most scientific minds, that, yes, there is a reason for everything that happens, whether we are able to know it or not, but that does not mean that forces from outside ourselves or outside the world are at work, which is usually what people mean when they say, as does Locke on the series Lost, that everything happens for a reason.

While Unitarian Universalists generally have a reputation of skepticism, there nonetheless reside amongst us both understandings of what ultimately is a question about the meaning of human existence. Everything happens for a reason VS there is a reason for everything that happens. Whether we can know why things happen or not is at the heart of theological and philosophical seeking; the heart religious debate. In fact, this is no less a theological debate than predestination.

Predestination is the theological argument put forward by John Calvin at the time of the Reformation. Calvinism is central in Presbyterianism, also some Baptist sects, and many Protestant denominations. Predestination states that since God knows all, is omniscient, and is all, omnipresent, then everything that has been and will be is known by God. To extrapolate from that premise, the Calvinists said/say that all the people who will be saved is already written in God’s Book of Life. The other side of that argument, theologically, is that God set the world in motion, and gave humans free will, so that each person can choose what they will do. What we often see, though, is that people can hold both these in some kind of tension within their minds, and believe that yes they have some control, but that God has more control; or that we have free will, but occasionally God does intervene. Confusing, I know.

I do not believe in fate, or so I say; yet, even rationalist that I am, there are times when various forces come together and I shake my head in wonder. Was it all just a happy coincidence, or was it meant to be? This may have to do with the importance of the situation in my life; to the larger significance. For example, when I met someone who happened to know someone who turned out to be the love of my life, it felt magical. I wanted it to be more than just coincidence. Yet, when a Mack truck read-ended my car last summer, I had no similar impulse. There was a reason, of course, which was the driver was following too closely. In fact, few people imagine the mundane things of life that often play the largest role in the whole of our lives happen for any higher, mystical reason. For example, few people would tend to say my making coffee this morning happened for a reason. Most people, even the diehard believers in the intervention of mystical forces would not say that. There is a reason I made coffee, of course—I wanted to drink some coffee. (Caffeine is not a factor since I drink decaf.)

Douglas Adams, that brilliant writer of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, wrote not long before his untimely death of a heart attack at age 49 in 2001, that in writing his book he had, in his words:

[R]educed it to what I thought were the bare essentials, which are . . . “anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again”. In fact you don’t even need the second two because they flow from the first one, which is self-evident and there’s nothing else you need to say; everything else flows from that.

Everything else flows from that. That? What is the that? The Big Bang? That is what most scientific minds would say; what most rationalists would say. God? That is what most religious people, what theists or mystics would say.

This argument has a long history as far back as the ancient Greeks and Hebrews. The 17th Century philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz tied the theology to mathematics, which had been a popular thing to do for a while. Gregory Chaitin, a Leibnitz scholar wrote:

Despite living 250 years before the invention of the computer program, Leibniz came very close to the modern idea of algorithmic information. He had all the key elements. He just never connected them. He knew that everything can be represented with binary information, he built one of the first calculating machines, he appreciated the power of computation, and he discussed complexity and randomness.

If Leibniz had put all this together, he might have questioned one of the key pillars of his philosophy, namely, the principle of sufficient reason---that everything happens for a reason. Furthermore, if something is true, it must be true for a reason. That may be hard to believe sometimes, in the confusion and chaos of daily life, in the contingent ebb and flow of human history. But even if we cannot always see a reason (perhaps because the chain of reasoning is long and subtle), Leibniz asserted, God can see the reason. It is there! In that, he agreed with the ancient Greeks, who originated the idea.

There’s a story about Milo Stenson, the Dean of Students at Indiana State University, who informed Willis Manfred, the football coach, that his star player was being thrown out of college. Coach dashed over to Stenson's office and said:

"Dean, I'd like to know why you're expelling Malcolm."

The dean answered, "Well, we caught him cheating on a test."

The coach asked, "How do you know he was cheating?"

"Coach," said the dean, "he was sitting next to a straight-A student, and the history professor gave a pop quiz of ten questions. The first nine answers on the two papers were identical."

And the coach said, "Well, you know, that could happen."

Dean Stenson said, "Yes, that's true. But it was the tenth answer that really sealed his fate. You see, the straight-A student answered that tenth question, 'I don't know.' And your prize player Malcolm wrote, 'I don't know, either.'"

My personal belief is that I don’t know, and you don’t know either, at least about whether we can ever know why things happen. I try to always to be open to learning about why things happen, but usually I don’t think it matters nearly as much as whether or not we use what we know or believe to better the world in some way.

There is a very popular book in evangelical Christian circles, called The Purpose Driven Life, by pastor Rick Warren; it’s even read by some of our UU clergy—I’ve read excerpts of it myself. In the book you are given to understand that God has a purpose for your life. I have always believed and preached that we do best in our lives when we operate from a clear and foundational purpose. Mine is that I should work to teach, preach, and model that motivations from caring and love are the best ways to live our lives. I want to leave the world a bit better for my having been here, not just my own life. The big difference, though, for most UU pastors, is that we do not tend to believe that there is a pre-designed (predestined) reason or purpose. Rather, we believe we can chose to act in one way versus another, for we know that every action has an effect. No life is a cipher. No life arrives and departs without making some mark. Even the street person who dies on the corner makes a mark.

There is a reason for everything that happens for a reason. That we are all here this morning is the result of chains of events that lead far back into history. That history has manifold components: financial, religious, physical, emotional, war and pure accident.

Pure accident? Luck? Yes, I do believe in luck. Yet, I believe this in the way of the scientist Louis Pasteur who said: Chance favors the prepared mind. It was not just luck that allowed for his discoveries. If he had just been sitting on his fanny waiting for scientific discoveries, no doubt we would not talk about pasteurized milk, it might instead be rabinowitzized milk (you never know!). I do think that sometimes things happen that make a big difference for which we could never plan, or guess, or sometimes even study; they are random. But without the preparation of the mind, or body as the case may be, we would not recognize the opportunity. Aha moments usually come because we have been wanting or actively seeking something. Every parent has pointed out that you cannot wait for life to grant you want you want; you have to work for it or work toward it.

There is a reason for everything that happens for a reason. The more important an event is in our lives, especially when it relates to love or fear or death, the more we seek to know the reason why. In this way, we may be biologically programmed to seek to either repeat or avoid the event.

The reason might as well be 42, too. Most of the time, the reason is far less important than what we do with the result of any given event. We can talk all day about why 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina happened, or why a loved one is diagnosed with cancer, and we should certainly at least explore why things happen, but we have a response to make that calls on us to do more than look at or for the reasons why. All too often the reasons just give people excuses for hate and revenge, when this world, particularly your world and my world, will not be a better, happier, more fruitful world unless we learn to respond to all of life with love, responding with all the manifestations of love that begin with simply refusing to hate and move forward to heal, to renew, to create. This is the call of our faith.

Yes, there is a reason for everything that happens, and everything happens for a reason, but more importantly there is a reason for everything you and I decide to do, and everything we plan to do from this moment forth. Let us make those reasons over which we have control count for good.

So be it

May 21, 2006 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

May 21, 2006

You Gotta Serve Somebody

Somebody once said of George Burns’ singing, that it sounded like a garbage disposal with a spoon caught in it. In the same vein, I think it was Milton Berle who said of Bob Dylan’s singing: “He has a great voice. Unfortunately, it’s in someone else’s throat.”

Anyone who has ever heard Bob Dylan sing would have to say he has a terrible voice. If you liked smooth, lovely voices like Frank Sinatra, or in my generation, Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers, Bob Dylan would not have been your cup of tea. Out of that time, in the late 1950s, when voices were supposed to smooth and pretty, and tunes were supposed to be melodic, Dylan came rasping and screeching, often in a strange or peculiar rhythm, and then added to it the rasping and screeching of his harmonica. He was a phenomenon in his performance. If singing alone had been Dylan’s intention, we would never have heard of him.

For several years I have wanted to do a sermon on Bob Dylan’s music, but the problem was how to do without the music, and the problem was how to do it with the music. This year I decided to just dive in and make the best of it. Besides, what matters most to me about music for Sunday services is not the melody, nor whether we sing them well, but the words. The songs, hymns, carols, chants, all that panoply of music that has always been intimately connected with religion around the world and down through the ages, has been for me and most people at some level, about the message. I love a song that touches the heart. I am a big fan of Abide with Me, Amazing Grace, choral renditions of Ode to Joy, and as Bob will tell you, anything with the tune Finlandia. I love good singing and grew up in a religious tradition that valued good singing. Methodists are well known for great hymn singing. But what many UUs may not know is many of the hymns that appear in Protestant hymnals were written by Unitarians in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

We Unitarians, though, are always focused on the message. You know the old joke that the reason Unitarians can’t sing is because they are always looking ahead to see if they agree with the words. There is a smidgen of truth in that. However, I take exception to the idea that Unitarians can’t sing, because in most of congregations they sing just fine. And Unitarians clearly enjoy music.

Bob Dylan’s songs had a profound influence over my most formative years; those college-age years when we are touched so much by the things that will mark our generation. This is true for people of each generation. Bob Dylan’s singing was not what mattered, it was the message in the songs he wrote in that time of great change; a time of the changing of the guard that John F. Kennedy remarked upon in his inauguration speech. Kennedy, a young president, for a young people who were not happy after a decade of McCarthy hearings, Communist scare tactics with kids of my time ducking and covering in the case of some inevitable nuclear war, and all leading to revolution about war and peace, but unlike many such revolutions, much of it was conducted in song.

Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger (a Unitarian), were to become the chief spokespersons-in-music for that era, really beginning for them with the Depression and rise of the unions after generations of big business working the life out of immigrants from Europe for long hours, little pay, no benefits, and no security. This music gets labeled generally folk music; music that has a message of some special or topical kind. Of course, folk music has been around as long as there have been people, especially people who feel oppressed. So folk music is lots of things: organizing music, music reminding people of the injustices of their condition, and, most especially, protest music meant to unite and mobilize people to action. Some of this music is in our hymnal like Bread and Roses and We Shall Overcome. So attached is the later to civil rights that I find it almost impossible to use it in a service except when doing a sermon on the Civil Rights movement. It is an anthem for that time, though the hymn is far older, and an anthem for a much earlier time.

Bob Dylan, the boy Bob Zimmerman from the iron range country in Hibbing, Minnesota, born May 24, 1941, was growing up in the time of radio, and he spent much of his time listening to this music that also included country and bluegrass music, blues, gospel, and rock n’ roll. Most connected in various ways with the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised, and protest against that suffering.

Dylan became truly enthralled with the music of Woodie Guthrie, like the Dust Bowl Blues, and most famous, This Land is Your Land. Music scholars say that there is a direct line in all music from musician to musician, and in folk music it was from Woodie Guthrie, to Pete Seeger, to Bob Dylan. This music was serious stuff, music that had meat in terms of lifting up the truth of the human condition. None of the three had great voices, they were/are messengers. Further, all of their best music was recorded by many other musicians with better voices, recorded many times over—such was the power of the messages.

The message was and remains for me the real test of any song. I became a member of folk group in high school. It seemed very important to me at the time not just to sing, I sang in a lot of places, church, the school choir, but folk music had my heart. I had grown up in a rural area, of agricultural folk, who loved the music of the church, but they loved the country and the western music (at that time they were divided into distinct categories). My dad especially loved the Sons of the Pioneers and Bob Wills, and two uncles of mine were in a western swing group that played for local groups and had their own program on the local radio station. Friday night music sessions were common in our family, and practically every one played a guitar, mandolin, or banjo—most not all that well, but I loved these music nights (they are the best memories of my growing up years), and learned to play rhythm guitar well enough to earn a place in any session, and into the folk group very aptly named with two girls and two guys, The Fellows.

Bob Dylan was of our generation, though, and his rough edge made him stand out, but again it was the songs he wrote that really captured this generation. He was that oddity of every generation, a genius, who becomes a conduit of the message that speaks to the needs, fears, and longings of the larger group; and, like most such geniuses (Beethoven comes to mind) he was not interested in fame, nor willing for fame to define him and his music.

Dylan marks himself as even more unusual in that he never has claimed in his life to date, nor in his biography, Chronicles, nor in a recently released Martin Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home, that he intended to be any messenger. Unlike Woodie Guthrie or Pete Seeger who saw themselves in the role of prophet, Dylan has always steadfastly refused this label in either intention or in fact. He has consistently stated that he has felt himself on a journey, on my way home, he says in the film. He felt in his way called (even as ministers are called) to write the music in someway that seemed beyond any ambition or desire; almost as if he had no choice. But, that is also what many other prophets have said—remember Jonah.

In many ways, it seems to me that Bob Dylan was conduit, that he connected with the environment of the time--and from widely reading in history, literature and poetry--and transmitted it in song. He could, as it were, absorb all that, and distill it into a meaningful message that became iconic for a whole generation. So, as artists of all time have done, he caught a rising tide of discontent and was lifted up by it, and in the process lifted the rest of us up who cared about these things.

Folk music, especially in this line of Guthrie, to Seeger, to Dylan most clearly shaped my philosophy; it shaped the philosophy of that generation roughly labeled the 60s. We were defined by war, as were our parents, but unlike our parents we did not have a noble or just war, but Viet Nam. We were also defined by the Civil Rights movement as the previous generation had been defined by the union movement. Of course, the spirit of generation does not include every single person born in that time, but that kind of spirit--the defining issues of a generation--is ultimately what goes down in history. How, on the scale of significance, every generation is rated. We did not rate nearly so highly as our parents, at least not at the time, but then protest rarely connects people as well as rallying war cries and nationalism. But in the longer course of history, the generations of protest get their due. The American Revolution did not look pretty in the making, it is only in the two-hundred and eighty years since that it has got such a squeaky clean image. That is the way of history.

Dylan says that he identified with Guthrie, with Odetta, and with Hank Williams. He felt something of what they sang, even though as a Jewish kid from a lower-middle class family, his experience was not the same. Though he talks about the dying town of Hibbing, MN, in the Rust Belt of the iron range, how he could see suffering around him, more importantly he felt the suffering of those singers through the words of the songs they sang.

This is the importance of all art; that it teaches others something important about place and time. Picasso’s paintings were to oil and canvass what Pete Seeger’s and Bob Dylan’s song lyrics were to music. Upheaval, suffering, pain, trial, all those words that mark a shifting and transitional period in history.

Some people, Allan Ginsberg most notably, said of Bob Dylan, that he was “channeling Woodie Guthrie.” Dylan says that the protest songs, the rebel songs, led him on a pilgrimage east to see Guthrie, who by that time was hospitalized with Huntington’s Disease which was destroying his mind. Then, in the seeking, he wound up in the Mecca of folk music of the late 50s, Greenwich Village. Dylan says the most important thing he learned in that time of dues-paying, working in all kinds places from dives to street corners, was from Liam Clancy, a folk singer from Ireland, who told Dylan: Remember, Bob, no fear, no envy, no meanness. It was to mark him is ways that remain frustrating for people who are determined to put him and his music in a box. He was never afraid of pushing back when people, the fans, reporters, music critics, tried to corner him and his music.

I never saw Bob Dylan play in person, but I was surprised to learn that he rarely played a concert, especially during the years of his early twenties, when he was not booed by a segment of the audience. Booed because he moved on and wasn’t just playing acoustic guitar, or because was refusing to claim a prophet’s mantle. He always has said, in effect: I just write what comes into my head, I don’t have a message for the masses. I am just doing my own thing.

People were constantly saying, reporters especially, that he had the pulse of generation; that he spoke for so many people. He did do that, but he never claims to have intended to do that.

Perhaps what frustrated some many people the most was that they could not dictate how he used his fame. He says in the film: “You can’t let them [the fans] kill you with kindness.” Meaning that you can’t let others dictate how you lead your life, or what you do that you need to do to be true to yourself. That was a very telling line for me, for I think often we UUs are people who have, in our own small ways, defied convention in order to be true to ourselves. It is harder to do than most people think.

Pete Seeger said that Dylan once commented, when someone asked him if he was happy: Happy? Anybody can be happy. What’s the purpose of that?” Indeed, if our only goal is to be happy, what is the purpose in that? That is a central spiritual question for anybody.

My sermon last week was about the need we have to find reasons for everything. If someone has a car wreck, they say, “it happened for a reason.” That is a mystical/magical point of view. Or they may examine it more rationally and say: “There is a reason for what happened.” Dylan has a lyric that says: Ain’t no use to sit and wonder why. Which for him and for many of us simply means not to get caught up in second-guessing why things happen, but to learn and then move on.

Life has hard times which came out in the song lyric, it’s a hard rain’s gonna fall. This was written on the evening of Cuban Missile Crisis when it did indeed look like a nuclear rain might fall, but Dylan says it was not about that but the condition of life for which he wrote it. Still, you can see how our generation easily read it to fit our concerns.

What Dylan refers to as widespread folk idiom, was his artistic medium. He looked at the world with that clear-eyed sight of some people who are by nature iconoclasts, rebellious, who do not allow others to dictate to them what and how they will be. Most people are conformists; we value a high degree of conformity in community, though we may deny it. And while long hair on boys in the 60s, the purple streaks in her hair my daughter had in college in the 80s, and the piercings and tattoos of this generation may not look like to the parents like conforming, they are conforming to the norms of their group. It is a reliable pattern. But people like Bob Dylan, artists generally, do not conform wholly to anyone generation. They are from it, but not of it.

The song Masters of War was to touch millions of 60s era youth who were either being drafted or in avoiding it. It seemed to us a strong political message meant to motivate us to protest the war in Viet Nam, but when he was interviewed at the time, Dylan refused that role. He has consistently claimed he is not a political person, unlike Seeger who clearly was and is. Dylan has never allowed anyone to state who he is, what he does; he speaks for himself.. He has expended a fair amount of energy just telling the truths people didn’t want to hear about what in fact were his intentions and motivations.

When he converted from essentially non-practicing Judaism to evangelical Christianity, he was roundly criticized by those who had accepted him early on, and then lifted up by that Christian evangelical community as theirs, which ultimately led to his leaving that group. From the western music of my Dad’s time, he was always saying don’t fence me in. I admire that more than I can say. It is a good philosophy: Don’t put God in a box, and don’t let others put you in a box. And don’t try to put other people in boxes either. This is an important Unitarian understanding of respect for others.

The one place where he was more deeply touched, though, was in the work of Civil Rights. Dylan says that he was near Martin Luther King, Jr., on the steps of the Lincoln monument when King gave that famous I have a Dream speech; and he did go to a number of civil rights rallies to sing. He wrote a song about the people who killed Medgar Evers: He’s only a Pawn in the Game, about how these KKK types serve/d a greater master of a racist society that does not want change.

While his music, like He’s only a Pawn in the Game, often seemed to have such special insight, Dylan again, consistently refuses any such claim. Joan Baez, his one time lover, said that Dylan almost without effort wrote out his feelings. That he never intellectualized them in the way she, or others of that protest singing group, did.

The songs of his predecessors made him sensitive to a way of looking at and thinking about life and the world around us. He said: "Those old songs are my lexicon and prayer book," [and, of folk music] "That’s my religion," he said. "I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists…I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity."

Music was/is Dylan’s real religion. He said in an interview in 1983: Whoever said I was Christian? Like Gandhi, I’m Christian, I’m Jewish, I’m a Moslem, I’m a Hindu. I am a humanist.”

I believe he has been a truth teller in his music, if not always in the interviews to promote his music in the early days. He does, despite his motivations, or lack of them, speak to and for many of us, because we do not have that language or that skill.

Does he speak to modern youth? I doubt it. But there is no doubt that some young musicians have been molded by him in that unbroken line that we see going at least as far back as the Psalms in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. I don’t know who that person is who speaks for this generation, anymore than my parents could tell you anything about Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan. But the youth could tell us. That is the way of generations moving through the ages.

My favorite of all Dylan’s music is the song that is the title of this sermon, You Gotta Serve Somebody. It is a great truth that often escapes us as we humans keep trying to get more money, more power, more glory. No matter who you are, what your circumstance, ultimately we all serve somebody else. This is the great leveler of human existence. No one is an island; no one is without some influence however lowly.

I have little doubt that Bob Dylan’s music is of that status of importance that it becomes part of what we call and understand as the classics of a time. Further, as long as there are people suffering in the world, there will be people singing these songs from the folk era. They have a great purpose. Dylan is a prophet, even if not an intentional one. You may be, too. That is what touches me most deeply in his music. What even our own James Luther Adams, the great Unitarian theologian at Harvard termed in his book, The Prophethood of all Believers; we each have within us the ability to speak and to do; to be prophets in the way we live our lives. To be touched as Dylan was touched by something greater than himself, and live out those words he heard when first he determined to follow the road of the artist songwriter: no fear, no envy, no meanness. May it be so for all of us.

Amen, Blessed be